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To: Golden Eagle
I already said of course.

Debating with you is almost no fun anymore since you constantly don't know what you're talking about.

You are wrong of course given the available information. Simply violating a license by not abiding by the terms (if those terms are deemed enforceable by the court) is a civil tort, not a crime, thus, no "criminals." It could be come a crime had they copied OS X itself and widely sold it beyond a certain dollar value amount, but nothing in the article indicated this.

They could also be liable for contributory infringement if the court deemed the main purpose was to install unlicensed ("pirated") copies of OS X on other PCs. Again, it is a civil tort matter.

Aside from the licensing the DMCA, horribly written by the copyright cartel, does rear its ugly head. It forbids the practice of reverse-engineering like this for the most part. So, IF their actions didn't fit into the exceptions (such as interoperability, which is what they were doing) then they are subject again to civil tort. It could become a criminal matter IF they were doing it for profit, but they freely distributed the tool to do it, so no profit.

However, the DMCA has a spotty history in going after people like this anyway. I know of one victory, where the hacker Eric Corley was sued over DeCSS (which cracked DVD encryption). The ruling was IMHO highly questionable since they ignored the Fair Use allowance in the DMCA, dismissed 1st Amendment Free Speech considerations, and the court was really biased against Corley since he was an infamous hacker.

I know of many losses though. One was for reverse-engineering Lexmark's printers that only allowed the them to accept Lexmark ink refills (the competing cartridge maker won). Another was by Chamberlain, maker of garage door openers, against an independent maker of garage door opening remotes who had reverse-engineered Chamberlain's door opening codes (the opponent won). The one against the Russian company Elcomsoft was criminal since Elcomsoft was selling PDF-cracking software for profit (with the FBI among their customers), but they were acquitted. Also, the RIAA threatened Prof. Edward Felten with the DMCA for figuring out how to remove their audio watermarks, but they quickly backed off after he went public about it.

So as usual you are talking about subjects on which you are woefully uneducated.

You are welcome for the primer in copyright law and precedent. Class dismissed.

119 posted on 10/25/2006 7:19:03 PM PDT by antiRepublicrat
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To: antiRepublicrat
You can believe all that BS somehow justifies your lies defending criminal Russian hackers all you want. It only proves who the real fool is.
120 posted on 10/25/2006 7:36:05 PM PDT by Golden Eagle (Buy American. While you still can.)
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